On a Chicken Mission

Liz plucks the final bird. 3 finished birds
are in the background.

This post sees us finally through the harvest of the Hubbard variety chickens. Regular readers will know that the Hubbard is a commercial breed used widely in Ireland by farmers supplying the supermarkets with, specifically, Free Range and Organic chickens. We get them as day-olds and grow them through to around day 90 by which time they have reached 2-4 kg oven-ready weights and are just the most succulent, tender, meaty and flavoursome chicken you will ever put on the table.

The final 3 hens and a cock await jointing and/or vac-packing

These are normally only available in industrial scale batches (10,000 for example) but our friends Mentor Anne and Simon who were once in that business, are still 'in' with a guy who manages one of the big hatcheries and is happy to make up mini-orders to suit we few smallholders. We get a dozen and A+S add those to their own 'few dozen' order. If you like, go back a few months on this blog for some pics of a previous lot newly arrived  (http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2016/05/hubbard-chick-at-2-days-little-list-of.html ).

Vac packed and ready for the freezer

Those regular readers will also know that the latest batch have now 'cooked' and we have been processing them at a two a day for the last week. That brought us to Saturday with 4 birds remaining. Normally we'd share the load but that day Liz decided she was "in the Zen" for a solid 2-3 hours of plucking and gutting.

Fringe benefit of a Hubbard kill. Lovely fresh paté

She took the laptop into the kitchen, put on an Oz murder-mystery series on download which she is currently "binge-watching", shut the door to keep out the kittens (they are devils for climbing up your back without warning, leaping from the floor to about waist height, then digging their claws in for a scrabble to shoulder height. Poor Liz is lacerated about the nape and fed up with the pain, and was going to be working in the warm kitchen with her shoulders protected only by a tee shirt and apron) and went for it.

Boiled chicken feet? Not your cup of tea?
The dogs LOVE them

My part in this is to bring in the killed birds on demand, supply tea in regular and copious amounts (plus the occasional G+T if the job is running past 'yard-arm') and then, at the end, jointing, vac-packing, finding homes for all this largesse in the freezer(s) and disappearing the bags of feathers, guts, heads and any other unmentionables. I can pluck but I am nothing like as careful or patient as Liz and my birds end up looking a bit like road-kill with torn skin, etc. Liz picks away carefully and gently, busily and efficiently producing lovely looking oven-ready birds. She is very good at it and has found, to her own amazement (Dublin city-girl!) that she thoroughly enjoys it and finds it very therapeutic. I, of course, am not arguing. My job is to hatch (if necessary), rear and 'grow' the birds and then kill them and bring them to the kitchen door and take away any bags of waste. It is a neat and easily worked team effort. We both, of course, thoroughly enjoy eating them!

Sunday morning dawned Hubbard-less but also with a good frost. During my first livestock rounds (which now includes getting 'wet', liquid water out to the birds - the ducks and geese do love to wash their faces and they are unimpressed by that rock-hard crust that comes on the drinkers these mornings. The outside tap is, of course, frozen up, so this involves bringing out buckets of water from the kitchen) I had heard what I thought were a few more Whooper swans flying N-S past us to the West and being called down by more birds on Lough Feigh. I headed down there again with my long lens, hoping to improve on my '365' pics of last week.

No luck on the swans by then (10 am). The Lough is quite low at present and was completely frozen over except among the reed beds, so there was not a swan to be seen, not even the ubiquitous Mute Swans. I had to satisfy myself with a couple of picturesque frosty scenes and a small flock of wigeon zig-zagging about. I'd given up and headed home when I got my best surprise of that day - I put up a snipe. I don't think I have ever seen one before but I know that, in theory, they do live here.

This tiny 'dot' cropped out of the middle of a huge blank
sky is my snipe. First one I'd ever seen, never mind photo'd.

Of course, once it had exploded into flight it was quickly up to a gazillion mph and headed away from me as fast as its little blurring wings could go. I whipped up the 400 mm and fired off a couple pics and thank Heaven for modern "image stabilization" on these fancy lenses. He was outta there. I was relieved to be able to crop this silhouette from the resulting huge, featureless picture of grey sky.

Thawed patch and neat pile of poo tells
the tale of where one sheep slept last night

Finally I have had some fun today helping to clear away the outdoor archery equipment for our Coach, Con who is currently laid up in his bed, too sick to do any hefting and carrying but fretting because all the gear was still 'out there' getting rained on and frozen.

We all laughed at this superb pic of archery
boss-lady, Niamh who had finally nailed that
coffee cup with a superb tight pattern of 3
arrows. Ace shooting Niamh!

Our archery field 'out there', south of Castlerea town is a square with earth banks thrown up all round it like ditches and walls, a copy of an Irish fort (or 'Rath'). In one corner is an access gap for Con's tired old ride-on mower which comes with a handy little trailer.

From shortage to glut. We probably have
'enough' eggs now.

My job, helped by our archery 'boss-lady' Niamh (Brits may need to know this is pronounced "Neave") was to scurry back and forth collecting up all the 3D foam-rubber targets (life-size animals like wild boar, ibex and deer, fox etc), logs, tarpaulins, metal 'tent-peg' pins and pallets, bring them all to dry storage. On Sunday a gang of us will return to demolish the big marquee and then Con will be able to get some healing sleep. Get well soon, Con!

Ten Years a-Blogging!

Yep. November the 18th. It was on this day exactly ten years ago that I first stuck a rather wary toe into the unknown waters of blogging. I can remember I didn't have a clue and I can tell that from those first posts with titles like "Bear with me on this...." and no photographs. I have been a diary-writer all my life and I thought it should be fairly a-kin to that. I had recently bought our Westie bitch 'Deefer'. I thought it would be cute/clever/funny to go exploring the 'blogosphere' as if seeing it through her eyes, so my cast of characters in the early posts had me as 'Dad', Liz and 'Mum', our old dogs as 'Big Sister' and so on.

First ever post. 

I have only 2 bits of advice for anyone thinking that they might try blogging and the first would be don't do that "cute", speaking-as-if-you-were-a-pet thing. It quickly became rather limiting, not funny and plainly rather silly. It also got a bit complicated finding new pseudonyms for everyone. I was quickly looking for a good break-point where I could bail out as 'Deefer' and take over the keyboard myself. The other option was to stop altogether and then, after a break, return, as if by magic, as a human. In the end I took the 30,000 page-views point. It was as good a land mark as any.

My other advice, for what it's worth, is make sure you have something to say; a story to tell or opinions bursting out of you that you just HAVE to share with someone. There is nothing worse than a blog post which says "I'm bored". If you've nothing to say, then park the thing till you have something. If you have an urge to write then this can be easier said than done, but I know this blog flagged a bit when it was all "went to work, came home, walked the dogs, ate, went to bed". It is so much better when I got to 'moved to Ireland' and 'ripped the house to bits and rebuilt it' or we started to accumulate livestock. The latter also made for much better pictures accompanying the text.

There's always food! This a rolled rib roast.

Anyway, here we are, ten years, 1794 posts and 156,884 page views later. I am obviously never destined to be a best seller, I never went "viral" (as they now say) and I have never hob-nobbed it with JK Rowling but I chug along with around 30 people looking in at each post. Mainly you are friends and family and I am eternally grateful for your support, comments and loyalty. Once we were in Ireland the blog also quickly became a sub for a "letter home to Mum" - she gets colour prints of all these posts (thanks to my very generous, UK-based bro' ) and tells me she knows more about what Liz and I get up to now we are 500 miles away than when we were 45 miles away in Kent.

It is quite tricky to get a pic of the 5 sheep as Silas always
comes sprinting over to say 'Hello'.

Meanwhile, back out in the bitterly cold, slightly snowy landscape, the 18th November is also significant as being Day 18 of Silas's visit. You will recall from an earlier post that ewes 'cycle' around a 13-18 day heat and, had they been on heat when he showed up, by today all 4 of them should have come fully on and been 'seen to'. We would now be changing the raddle colour and watching him for another 18 days to see did any of the ewes "return to service". If they picked up the new radde colour that would mean that they had not been made pregnant last time round (and now might be).

A light dusting of snow last night.

In practise it is proving to be a lot less exact and scientific than I thought it would. We have not seen Silas chasing anyone about in any convincing way or mounting anyone. He quickly 'washed off' the raddle colour on the wet grass and none of the ewes have ever been convincingly 'slapped' with the blue paint. Never mind. The lad is staying in there till, probably, the other side of Christmas so he has plenty of time to grow a bit in size and in confidence and, if he doesn't actually 'score' this time he will, we hope, have had some fun learning and practising and he will be all the better for it next winter. For the moment, anyway, he is the only show in town.

The weather has taken a turn for the worse and Thursday saw us getting some first sleet. There was a dusting of white on the car, log piles and the grass this morning and we had to scrape the windows of the car clear for Liz to drive to work. Local comment has it that this is "very early"; they were all enjoying the very mild weather.

3 whooper swams dramatically lit against the dark forestry
and storm clouds

The Whooper swans are back - our winter visitors who join is each November from their Iceland nesting grounds. We first see a few flying in to the local lough (L.Feigh) and then notice their fluting chatter of an evening after dark, which comes to us on the wind or in the stillness. I nipped down to the lough armed with the long lens and caught a few reasonable pictures of them glowing white in the sunshine against the dark of the forestry and an impressive storm cloud. I was also gifted a flock of wigeon - another winter visitor (a duck this time).

Wigeon

In our own birds we are nearly through processing the Hubbard meat chickens and we are very pleased with them. The (5) roosters have all come in with oven ready weights of 2.4 to 2.8 kg and the (7) hens just under 2 kg each. We had one of the hens roasted last night, when a leg each and a breast between us did us proud, so the remaining breast, wings and stripped bits served as cold left overs tonight with garlic bread and our regular Bulgarian "shopska" salad (like Greek salad but with no olives!)

Mute swans down on the lough.

Ah well, I hope you join me in wishing this blog a Happy Birthday for the first ten years. I am not sure I can promise another ten but it is with me for the fore-see able future.

Patterns and Toiles, Bows and Arrows

Three and a half tonne of pea gravel arrives.

The heavy rain falling here while I was away, in the skirts and train of Storm Barney pointed up to Liz how worn and threadbare our driveway had become for want of a refreshing layer of gravel. Great puddles form down in the dip by the main gate, so that you struggle to open the gate without getting your feet wet. The drive slope is OK but at the top where it levels out, more dips and low points give us a few more puddles which push out a tideline of floating larch needles so that you can see how big they were even as they drain away.

The turkeys and Guinea fowl explore the new garden feature. 

My first job then, on return from the UK was to order gravel but I knew that the entrance to the sheep field was also getting a bit worn and sloppy, so I went for 3 and a half tonnes, the convenient size of load from our very reasonably priced 'man who can'. This man is also helpful enough that he let me take most of the load "up at the top" but kept a bit back to drop at the main gate on his way out; saved me a considerable amount of barrowing. Good man! The turkeys and Guinea Fowl were quickly on hand to explore the new heap and marched about all over the top of it till they decided it had no potential as food.

The three 'yows' having a lie down, but are they pregnant?

It is now my job to barrow it about and 'fire' it into the holes. The sheep turn out to be not entirely convinced that this represents an improvement to their field entrance and they are very wary of walking through this 'soft' surface; their sharp little feet quickly sink down through the 3 inches of gravel and don't seem to stop till they hit the original mud. Ah well. It's cleaner for the wellie-clad humans and we have delibrately chosen round-edged 'pea gravel' rather than the more abrasive 804 'maintenance' gravel because we had visions of all the sheep going lame with sharp 804 stones stuck up between their toes.

Whooper Swans - picture blagged
from the internet.

In another winter story, we are delighted that "our" whooper swans are back. These birds breed and do their 'Summer' up in Iceland and are normally here in this land of 1000 lakes well before now but this year, being very late, had not yet delivered them. Our quota seems to be 20-30 birds on the local lough - I had 15 by Saturday and now have around 22; they don't seem to move around much once they have flown in though you do see small groups (families?) coming and going.

They look beautiful down on the water - you can see them from the lane running along our hilltop - but the main attraction to us is the fluting bugle calls as they chat to each other down there. If the air is still or the wind blows from our SW you hear lovely bursts of honking and fluting when you are in the garden or, more commonly, when I am in the orchard, exercising the dogs of an evening. Once you hear them there is no mistaking them which is quite handy as they are difficult to tell from other swans just on the visual clues. They are midpoint between mute swans (bigger) and Bewick's (which are smaller and don't come this far 'wesht') and can also be told by the yellow on the beak extending down below the nostrils. We'll stick with those lovely calls, I think.

Cutting a piece of the final cloth out round a panel of 'toile'

Meanwhile, indoors, Liz has now been to enough of Carolyn's "Sewing Machine School" classes to be confident to take a step from making cushions and table cloths (very good table cloths, mind) into proper dress making. Specifically dress making for herself which is a landmark stage (I read). It frees up the dress maker from having to buy off-the-peg clothes which nearly fit an average 'size 12' or what ever, to being able to make clothes which perfectly fit the unique body shape of the wearer (which is presumably nothing like 'average').

Dress in kit form. 

This has landed Liz into the world of making and cutting out paper patterns and then from these creating the 'dry-run' temporary version of the garment out of muslin, callico or (in our case) an old sheet. This is called the 'toile' (pronounced twal) and I read that you can actually keep and wear the toile around the house if you finish it. Most people adjust the panel sizes on the toile and then create the shapes on the real cloth. That's been my job - helping Liz, who is by then dressed only in skimpies, to try on and pin up the toile. I know. Tough job, trying not to stick pins in your wife's skin, but somebody has to do it. The latest on this first go is that the garment is now pinned up in the final cloth and the machine is whirring away like a good 'un, though we do have the occasional issue with darts stitched up on the wrong side and the occasional outbreak of mild swearing. It probably happens behind closed doors in the best of seamstress/tailor/draper workshops.

Nephew M Silverwood (centre) is getting pretty good at the
archery. Maybe he'll teach me some tricks?

Finally, you may, like us, have a mental "bucket list" in your head; those things you are determined to do before you shuffle off this mortal coil. One thing on mine has always been archery. As kids we brothers used to go and watch the (Hastings?) Archery Club doing their thing on one of the practise pitches at the top of the land owned by Hastings Football Club (the "Pilot Field"). You could watch them from Ochiltree Road which is/was just round the corner from us, though (another story) we would occasionally climb up the mud bank from one of our childhood 'dens' and pop our heads up into the bushes at the end of the field where we could see (and were probably in danger from) the arrows coming straight at us!

I have longed to have a go ever since but have never quite got into it - there were no doubt archery clubs and groups when I was at Uni (both sites) and there would almost certainly have been clubs in range when I lived in the Fens, then Chatham and Faversham. Step forward then, Mrs Silverwood, who posted to Facebook some pics of the children all wielding bows and arrows at a beginners session down in their nearby big town. This is their latest activity - you'll know that clutches of children work their way through a good range - these young ones have been through Irish dancing, GAA and other sports, baton twirling, karate and more. It seems my best chance of ticking this sport off my own bucket list has landed in my lap. I have been invited to come down on a Saturday afternoon, join the gang in the archery on Saturday evening, get a bite of supper and stay the night. I just have to cope with getting my head around young M being streets ahead of his Uncle. He has taken to it like a duck to water, apparently and out-shoots them all. Maybe he'll teach me a trick or two and I won't miss the target EVERY time. More on this when it has happened.

Of Bees and Brehon Law

My two whooper swans were down on the lough (again or still?) today so what ever the flying pair I reported in my last post were up to, they were not my lough couple off on their final move back to Iceland. We have them for a while yet, though we get very few of the still crisp nights in which to enjoy their nighttime bugle calls and the sounds of their splashing and chasing about. Spring is definitely coming, though. After a few days of strong winds and rain it was a lovely relief to wake up on the Sunday (8th) to still air, blue skies and bright sunshine. Very sloppy underfoot, but this sudden break gave us a chance to both get out into the garden and start to look around. We moved our 'giant' rabbits (Goldie and Nugget) to a new, grassier site out the front of the house and Liz whipped round the currant bushes and roses with the secateurs.

Garden assistants

Liz loves her roses and all the care, pruning and gardening jobs that go with them. We have quite a few and an area in the 'nursery' well stocked with new plants we are getting established in tubs and cuttings which we are trying to strike, some of which come from Steak Lady's old garden up in Portmarnock, now abandoned in the house move. A shaggy rose will always drag Liz outside even when the weather is saying stay in and knit or play on the internet but these guys have started into spring growth and stolen a march on the pruning process. Liz was heard having conversations with them apologising for cutting away all the new growth which they had worked so hard to create and reassuring them that they would thank her in the summer when they were growing into proper shapes covered in bloom. She thinks that this persuasion worked as "only one pulled my hair (Dublin Bay) and only L'Aimant scratched".

The pig area looking tidier now we've trimmed the fallen tree.

I am now only fewer than 3 weeks from my big scary Intermediate 'bee school' exam, so the study of bee books and documents, the watching of YouTube videos (one was a 75 minute lecture by a German lady to the (Irish) National Conference on bee mating biology) and the avid reading of all things bee have become part of the local focus. This includes reading the excellent Federation magazine from cover to cover  as soon as it lands and two particular items this month caught my eye (although they may be of no use in the exam!).

Naked tree trunk

One concerned how old Irish Law worked around bees as livestock. Regular readers will know that I am no historian and would hesitate to start pontificating on such a massive subject as historic legal systems, which support whole books, Professorships and PhD research, but bear with me. I can safely say that Brehon Law which existed in Ireland from way back till it was superceded by the arrival of the Normans (1169-ish) and by the coming of Roman Catholic Law is highly regarded as being solid, fair, logical and sensible. It was certainly a whole lot fairer in its treatment of the female half of the population when it came to estate ownership, dowries and marriages than the RC efforts which have followed.

'Old' Mrs Buff checks out the egg laying
potential of the pig ark. She approved.

The piece which caught my eye (Bee Keeping in Ancient Ireland by Fergus Kelly of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (An Beachaire Vol 70/3 March 2015)) was based around some luckily preserved 7th Century texts called 'Bee Judgements', thought to be the only evidence in the world of any legal framework for bee 'foraging' rights. If your cattle grazed someone else's land, then you had to pay the land owner for the grass, so if your bees foraged on the land, then you would need to compensate the owner just the same. The payments were either in swarms or honey, thus spreading bee ownership through the countryside. The beekeeper might be liable for compensation for injuries caused by his bees (stings) unless the injured party got stung while trying to steal his hive.

Poor Deefer. Denied access to 'Dad's lap, she sulked off to a pile of
wellies and tried to look as put out as possible.

If your bees started swarming, then as long as the swarm stayed on your land you owned the bees. If they took off across a neighbour's patch then you immediately lost full ownership. If you could keep them in sight you were allowed to give chase and capture them (provided you did no damage to his land) but you then owed him one third of all the honey it might make for that year. If you lost the swarm and the land owner claimed it then he/she had to give you 1/3 of the honey. Honey was, of course, the only sweetener available and was much relished (says Fergus Kelly) and valued. Nice article.

Lamb Savoyarde - a nice alternative to the hot-pots and
shepherds' pies. A lamb 'stew' layered with sliced potato.
Actually the very last of our stored Sarpo Mira.

The second piece which caught my eye is one which might interest Mentor Anne (it might even be a new one, Anne?) is in the News and Views section of the mag (An Beachaire) by Philip McCabe and concerns the possibility of honey being 'contaminated' with GMOs. This has already happened in 'canola' honey in Germany. Honey-production focused bee keepers who are pushing their hives to the limit, as well as taking too much honey and having to feed fondant or syrup, will sometimes also decide that their hives are short of pollen. Pollen is the protein and fats food for young larvae but is very difficult to get hold of, so these bee keepers use either 'pollen substitute' or 'pollen supplement' which are man made pastes mixed from "processed plant materials".

Pig trotters (Crúibíns or 'Crubbeens') glazed in mango chutney
Sweet, glutinous, sticky finger-licking good. 

As they are trying to mimic a high protein food, it will not surprise you to learn that these 'materials' are often those well known high protein ingredients, soya bean meal, maize meal and mustard. The real pollen itself is an allowed constituent of honey, so perhaps these companies thought that a little 'substitute' would not hurt. Well now they have been 'busted' and the German authorities have described them as 'completely irresponsible' and have said that anyone who uses this product ('Feedbee' made by a Canadian outfit) will risk breaking the 'zero tolerance' limit and their honey would not be marketable anywhere in the EU. We don't buy a lot of honey but I am reassured that this little tweak was stomped on so hard and so quickly.

A future knitter? Maybe not.

Finally, a bit of fun for those long evenings when you are pinned down by the 'orange warning' gales. I was gazing curiously at a bit of Liz's knitting a few days ago and wondering how this dexterous twiddling of a single strand of wool could make the wool be turned into a sheet of cloth which didn't just unravel as soon as you took it off the needles. Nothing for it but to give it a go, so Liz promptly set me up with two needles and a ball of wool, cast me on 20 stitches and gave me a very quick 'masterclass' in the fancy finger moves.

A not very square square.

To cut a long story short I got stuck in and battled through all those beginner mistakes which must be familiar to any knitter, rubbish and inconsistent tension, dropped stitches (some of which Liz rescued) and the inadvertent adding of 8 stitches to my original 20 as I worked my way up. I got to a reasonable level of competence on pure knitting before Liz had me trying to 'purl' it too, so I ended up with an inch or so of what is called 'stockinette stitch' (get me!) and was then even allowed to cast off myself. Not bad for a first effort but "square" it wasn't! For my next trick I intend to actually cast on my own square and knit it all. That might be the end of my sortie into knitting and I'm still none the wiser as to why it works, even though I know how it works.

If the Weather's Middlin'......

"If the weather's middlin'...", says John Deere Bob over the weekend, "I'd like you to cut down a couple of ash trees for me...." meaning on Tuesday (21st); he knew we were doing all the pig transport stuff on the Monday. Well, the weather was nowhere near "middling" as the tail end skirts of Hurricane Gonzalo roared through lashing us with a Sou'westerly gale and massive rain, which then veered to the North West and kept whacking us with squalls. The North West is our least favourite direction for winds, and the one which scares us most with its worrying rippling of our old out-building roofs. It has me racing around trying to think of new ways to shore up the weaknesses and lash down any potential flappy bits with wire and concrete blocks.

SW winds come at us all across Galway and finally come up against our massive black spruce trees in our 'woods' out front. The house itself is (we sincerely hope!) sound and the roof itself looked to us like one of the strong points in the property as purchased. At 2 storeys high it does a good job of shielding the outbuildings from the SW. It is the NW winds, thankfully not that frequent, which roar at us out of Clew Bay and in across Mayo, Kilmovee and the fields on that side of us, that have us having these conniptions. They hit the big concrete and rock gable end of the goose/chicken house and are pushed up and over like the wind on the leading edge of an aircraft wing. This puts all kind of lift on the dodgy corrugated iron and corrugated perspex sheets that make the South-facing roof slope, if not tied down, ripple along like (as Liz described it) like the keys on a cartoon piano.

I have shored them up to a degree but it is real bodgery, and if we ever win the lotto, we will be replacing that roof with new. Failing that I need to buy and install about 12 feet of some nice strong two by one and a half, which I can screw all the panels in that area to as a kind of 'not-fixed-down' top plate. That will replace what is there, in bits, mostly rotted out. You can not, of course insure these out buildings without the man from FBD wants to come and inspect them; I am sure any sensible insurance risk-assessor would take one look at ours and laugh like a drain. I wouldn't blame him! Anyway, Hurricane Gonzalo, as I write this, seems to have largely passed through leaving us with our roof panels shaken but not stirred. We appear to have gotten away with it this time.

Meanwhile, the Longford Bee Keepers group hold another of their monthly meetings, where a speaker will talk to us about swarm control but also about the training and exam for the next stage of our 'Bee School'. Coincidentally, they will also be able to give us our smart certificates for the last stage, our "Preliminary" certs. Most of 'us' got them last month but we missed that meeting, it being the day I flew home from the UK. Apparently there was an official photographer an' all, but we won't be in that one!

Extreme gardening - trimming brambles around the bee hive

Liz has already decided not to proceed on to the intermediate stage, which comprises three exams in a lot more depth than the first step, a written bee-science 'paper', a written method/process paper and a practical exam taken at your own apiary. She is happy, she says to stay on the nursery slopes. I am in two minds. I like the idea of going on, climbing through the official levels of 'expertise' up to the grand sounding "Bee Master" but some of these beekeepers get way more involved in their hives, more interfering, more 'control freak' and more fussing than we like to be with our own hive.

Liz gets to grips with our first
'pork' output.

We listen to our 'Two Marys' advising us to stop fussing, to leave the hive alone and let the bees get on with it. A lot of the fussing, the weekly (or even more frequent) cracking open of the hive to inspect it, is all about trying to squeeze every drop of honey out of the task. We are not that fussed about honey or maximising production, squeezing the assets as it were. We are more focused on the 'green' gardening, ecosystem, healthy population of pollinators aspect. I worry that to pass these exams and certainly to show sufficient experience with hive manipulation to convince the examiners that I am skilled enough to get the ticket, I will be forced to 'fuss' more than I am comfortable with. There's a conundrum for you.

Pig liver and heart. 

We dropped by the butcher today to collect our livers and hearts. The kidneys, apparently, one is still in each the carcass, the other gets cut about extracting samples for the trichinosis tests (which we have apparently 'passed' (i.e. negatives). The meat hangs in his fridge till Friday afternoon. Not having seen this before we were both amazed by how big an entire pig's liver is. They weighed about 1.75 kg each! They have now been cut up and bagged up as 9 sensible portions.

Finally, I am delighted to see that 'our' Whooper Swans are back, the first half a dozen have arrived at our local lough for their winter stay. I can now hear their fluting calls drifting up the ridge as I supervise the dogs in their off-the-lead session in the orchard. They must have flown in last night, so they have presumably had their own fun and games with Hurricane Gonzalo's skirt-train. Unless they were over on the Mayo coast, which would have given them quite a tail-wind, they would have been either skirting or battling into the storm. Autumn is definitely here.